This book brings contemporary ways of reconceptualizing the human relationship to things into conversation with seventeenth-century writing, exploring how the literature of the period intersected with changing understandings of the conceptual structure of matter, and how human beings might reconfigure their place in a network of non-human relations. Focusing on texts that cross the frontier between literature and science, Snider recovers the material and body worlds of seventeenth-century culture as treated in poetry, natural philosophy, medical treatises, and prose fiction. He shows how a...